Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/115

 until a very late period, even without any repayment of what the new possessor having no udal right may have paid for it, or laid out upon it; and at the present day a right of redemption within a certain number of years, is competent to those udal-born to an estate which has been sold out of a family. The right to the crown of Norway itself was udal-born right in a certain family or race, traced from Odin down to Harald Haarfager through the Yngling dynasty, as a matter of religious faith; but from Harald Haarfager as a fixed legal and historical point. All who were of his blood were udal-born to the Norwegian crown, and with equal rights of succession in equal degrees of propinquity. The eldest son had no exclusive right, either by law or in public opinion, to the whole succession, and the kingdom was more than once divided equally among all the sons. This principle of equal succession appears to have been so rooted in the social arrangement and public mind, that notwithstanding all the evils it produced in the succession to the crown by internal warfare between brothers, it seems never to have been shaken as a principle of right; and the kings who had laboured the most to unite the whole country into one sovereignty, as Harald Haarfager, were the first to divide it again among their sons. One cause of this may have been the impossibility, among all classes, from the king to the peasant, of providing otherwise for the younger branches of a family than by giving them a portion of the land itself, or of the products of the land paid instead of money taxes to the crown. Legitimacy of birth was held of little account, owing probably to marriage not being among the Odin-worshippers a religious as well as a civil act; for we find all the children, illegitimate as well as legitimate, esteemed equal in udal-born right even to the throne itself; and although high descent on the mother's side also ap-